Creating a custom Cura plugin

[DMar 0]

Hi guys,

 

I was looking into how to automate some stuff I frequently do in Cura, but I haven't found any reliable, comprehensive documentation on how to do this. The official documentation seems woefully incomplete on this subject and basically says nothing about how to actually make a plugin. Frustratingly, the Cura wiki says check the Uranium wiki for more details, and the Uranium wiki says to check the Cura wiki if you want to make plugins. There are some dummy example plugins but they don't really teach me anything useful.

 

As an example, something I'm trying to do is add a button which automatically adds a new cube mesh of a certain size to any print, which needs to act as a cutting mesh to apply different settings to that area of the print (like how you can do Per Model Settings --> Modify settings for overlaps). Does anyone know if this is possible with a plugin and if so, how I should go about making one? Or at least a good guide/tutorial on how to make plugins?

[ahoeben 1,984]

There is no "good guide/tutorial on how to make plugins", other than the wiki:

https://github.com/Ultimaker/Uranium/wiki/Plugins  (and other pages in the same wiki, like https://github.com/Ultimaker/Uranium/wiki/Creating-Plugins)

 

Honestly the best way to learn how plugins work is to learn by example. What you want to make sounds very similar to the Support Blocker functionality in Cura. You may not be aware that lots of functionality actually is implemented as plugins. The Support Blocker (internally known as SupportEraser, but that's a bad name) is actually a relatively simple plugin. You can find the code here:

https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/tree/main/plugins/SupportEraser